Richard Bennett Sydney Hobart 50Th

A C R O S S F I V E D E C A D E S

P H O T O G R A P H I N G T H E S Y D N E Y H O B A R T Y A C H T R A C E

R I C H A R D B E N N E T T

A C R O S S F I V E D E C A D E S

P H O T O G R A P H I N G T H E S Y D N E Y H O B A R T Y A C H T R A C E
E D I T E D B Y M A R K W H I T T A K E R

L I M I T E D E D I T I O N B O O K

This specially printed photography book, Across Five Decades:

Photographing the Sydney Hobart yacht race, is limited to an edition

of

books.

(The number of entries in the 75th Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race) and ﬁve not-for-sale author copies.

Edition number

of

Signed by Richard Bennett

Date

R I C H A R D B E N N E T T O A M

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P R O L O G U E

People often tell me how lucky I am to have made a living doing something I love so much. I agree with them. I do love my work. But neither my profession, nor my career, has anything to do with luck.

My life, and my mindset, changed forever the day, as a boy, I was taken out to Hartz Mountain. From the summit, I saw a magical landscape that most Tasmanians didn’t know existed. For me, that moment started an obsession with wild places, and a desire to capture the drama they evoke on film. To the west, the magnificent jagged silhouette of Federation Peak dominated the skyline, and to the south, Precipitous Bluff rose sheer for 4000 feet out of the valley. Beyond that lay the south-west coast. I started bushwalking regularly after that, and bought my first camera. In 1965, I attended mountaineering school at Mount Cook on the Tasman Glacier, and in 1969, I was selected to travel to Peru as a member of Australia’s first Andean Expedition.

The hardships and successes of the Andean Expedition taught me that I could achieve anything that I wanted. I decided that I was going to be a professional photographer. My love of wild places was the catalyst for my career. It has also had the greatest inﬂuence on how I live my life. Wilderness gave me the mindset, and the skills, to create a successful business that revolves around wilderness, light aircraft, photography and the things I love.

In 1974 I took a scenic flight over the Sydney Hobart fleet. I took some aerial photographs. That led to a career niche, and a passion, that I love just as much today as I did nearly half a century ago. I love everything about the Sydney Hobart: the many moods of the sea, the sense of participation in a great adventure, the camaraderie, the tactics, sensing the proximity of the elements, the wildness of the sea, the gales, the different light, and the dramatic coastline.

All the elements are at play out there. It takes so much planning, yet as a photographer, you have to deal with whatever comes up. For me, yacht race photography is about dramatic seascapes, light, weather and timing. It’s about putting all those elements together. The ﬁnal great pleasure of this project for me, is time invested in crafting a beautiful, moody print that tells a story, not just about the yacht, but the seascape and the elements as well. And for the yachties, nothing preserves their personal Sydney Hobart history like a well-crafted photograph that will last for several generations.
© Alice Bennett

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By 1975, I had enough photography work to be a full-time professional and that’s reflected in the way I tackled that year’s race. I hired a commercial pilot, Rex Godfrey, and briefed him on my plans to photograph every boat. After chatting, we decided we’d make an event of it. We took our wives with us overnight to Flinders Island in Bass Strait, figuring that we’d fly out to the rhumb line in the morning and get the boats riding some swell on the forecast north-easter.
I had learnt photography by correspondence. One of the lessons was about showing speed in a photograph by using blur. I went out into the paddock and got my dad to drive his tractor down the hill as fast as it would go. I tracked him down the hill, holding the tractor steadily in the view finder while clicking off frames with a slow shutter speed. When I developed my pictures, the old Massey Ferguson tractor was sharp as a tack while the background was all blurred, just as it was meant to be. I knew I was good at it. I’d had years of practice shooting rabbits with a rifle for pocket money. Twenty pence each. It gave me the skills to track a yacht with a long lens while being battered by 130km/h winds. It doesn’t matter how fast your shutter speeds are. If you can’t track your subject, there’s going to be blur.
So, early on December 28, I rang the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania.
“G’day, Richard Bennett here. I want to photograph the yachts. Where are the race leaders?” “Kialoa’s off St Helens.”
I shot like a marksman. You line up your target, you take in a breath and let half the breath out. You freeze and you concentrate on the target. There’s a conscious thought process with each shot.

“Come again.” I thought he said she was off St Helens, which was more than 100 kilometres south of us on the Tasmanian east coast… and there was no way a boat could have got there in such a short time.
So, I took a few shots of Kialoa III with the sun behind those beautiful red, white and blue spinnakers and the light gleaming off the waves. We did a circuit then headed over to the American ketch Windward Passage which was only 20 minutes behind. These big, glamorous American boats were a new thing for the Sydney Hobart and they were strutting their stuff that afternoon. We got in behind Windward Passage and shot her with the wake sizzling out of the stern like a ski boat. It was a great shot that even 20 years later was used as the cover of a magazine.
“Kialoa’s going to beat the race record. She’s doing 23 knots and she’s off St Helens.” I put the phone down. “Hey Rex, come on.” We raced out to the airstrip and jumped into the Cessna 172 and took off.
We worked our way through the fleet, shooting as many as we could find, totally focussed on the fleet. We landed at Cambridge airport near Hobart in the late afternoon. Rex and I were over the moon. It had been a great day’s flying for Rex and I knew I had some excellent pictures in the bag, but a sudden realisation took the gloss off somewhat.
It was afternoon by the time we found Kialoa III off Maria Island, halfway down the coast. And wasn’t she a sight to behold. Magnificent! The maxi ketch was flying two spinnakers and a blooper, surfing down on the north-easter. With my thoughts on backlight and shadows on the water, I got Rex to drop down and approach her from the side with the sun behind her. I opened my cockpit window and stuck my 150mm Sonnar lens out

and squeezed the shutter button.

“Oh Bugger!” I said to Rex as we came in to land.

“What’s the matter?”

You need to have a feeling for the angles if you want to get sharp edges shooting from the air. If you shoot at

right angles to the aeroplane, it’s going to be blurred because of the speed of the aircraft, not to mention the up-and-down movement and the buﬀeting of the wind on your camera. I took the lens hood oﬀ the camera to reduce wind drag on it.
“Maureen and Sue!” We’d left our wives on Flinders Island.
If you get the pilot to approach at an angle that’s not quite head on and you shoot as far forward as you can from the side of the plane, there’s a brief window where you can get sharpness.

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K I A L O A I I I 1 9 7 5

Jim Kilroy’s Kialoa III was a wonderful sight to behold. She was planing at 23 knots on her way to breaking the race record in two days, 14 hours, 36 minutes and 56 seconds. The record stood for 21 years.

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W I N D W A R D P A S S A G E 1 9 7 5

One of the most beautiful and timeless yachts of the past 50 years, Windward Passage encountered a wind shift in the 1975 race which the crew had not identiﬁed soon enough. They lost 20 minutes and could not make up the time against Kialoa III. Winning this yacht race is not just about going fast, but having the right strategy and adapting to the ever-changing conditions.

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We tore up to Flinders Island the next morning to pick up our wives and then ﬂew out to the rhumb line and picked up a few more boats on our way south. As hard as I would try over the next 40 years and more, I would never actually manage to capture every boat in the race.

I got the prints done as fast as you could in those days at the local lab and took them down to Constitution Dock. I think I might have upgraded my display to a desk and easel by then. I saw the owner of Kialoa III, Jim Kilroy, heading towards me with the crew. He was on a high, having set a race record that was going to last for 21 years and I just happened to have that beautiful backlit picture of his boat. I showed him the print and he didn’t need to think about it long. “I’ll take that one in the largest size you’ve got (20 inches by 16 inches – what we’d call A2 these days). How many in the crew? Twenty-two? Okay we’ll take 23 of those.” They were $35 each at a time when the average weekly earnings in Australia was $146.

Then the owner of Windward Passage showed up and placed a similar order. Some of the crew bought ten copies for themselves in the same size. I sold somewhere between 60 and 80 prints of those two boats alone. Then there were all the other owners and crew coming through who were almost as keen about the pictures of their boats.

I realised I had a new career. And, it’s still going. I would never have dreamed that 46 years later I would sell gallery-quality prints of those 1975 shots of Kialoa III and Windward Passage for $1500 a print.

The following year, 1976, I met Nick Tanner, the chief pilot at Tasair. He was a gifted flyer who had the ability to always put me in the right spot, irrespective of conditions. I got a large sign with my name on it to stick on the side of the Cessna 172, and Nick started taking me close enough for the crews to be able to read it. Over the coming years I used a few great pilots. Most of them on their way to careers flying jets for the big airlines - which can’t be nearly as much fun as buzzing the fleet in a howling south-wester over the cliffs of the Tasman Peninsula.

A P O L L O 1 9 7 5

Apollo was designed by Ben Lexcen for high-proﬁle Australian businessman Alan Bond. Apollo was later owned by Jack Rooklyn who took line honours in the 1978 Sydney Hobart.

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T I N A O F M E L B O U R N E 1 9 7 8

Precision aerial photography is a partnership between pilot and photographer. The Cessna 172 had the aerodynamics for my style of photography and Nick Tanner could manoeuvre into the perfect position for my shot. This photograph is a classic example of that partnership, where I have been able to use the wake of the boat as a strong compositional element leading the eye to the subject. It was taken off the west coast of Tasmania during the Melbourne Hobart race which finishes at the same time as the Sydney Hobart race. Nick taught me what could be achieved with light aircraft and he taught me to have confidence in the air. This was also the first year I used the 6x7 Pentax camera. It had a larger negative than the Hasselblad, which gave me greater flexibility in enlarging the image and cropping images without losing quality, and a shutter speed that was twice as fast.

I wanted to tell the story of the sea state: the clouds, the wind; the wave pattern. I wanted to show how the wake peeled oﬀ the boat. How the mutton birds wheeled. I wanted to show the sea mist and the cloud pattern. But I wondered if I could also get the spectacular cliﬀs of the Tasmanian east coast into the shot. That became the next important thing for me to learn - how to produce a beautiful seascape that would stand as a photograph even without a single yacht in it.

I realised early on, that shooting from high above the boats gave only a water background. And it didn’t show the weather either. Weather is such an important aspect of Tasmanian life; it becomes a part of us. In other states, they cancel events because of the weather. Not here. If you didn’t do things because of rain or wind in Tasmania, you’d get nothing done. I don’t wait for sunny days to go and take pictures. I love storms. Absolutely love them. And the only way to capture their majesty is from down low, where you can get sky in the top of the frame and water in the bottom. And with some of the most amazing dolerite columns and sea cliﬀs forming the running rail for the Sydney Hobart home bend, I wanted to capture it all in a single frame.

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S I S K A 1 9 7 9

Siska, skippered by Rolly Tasker, took line honours in the 810 nautical mile Great Circle race around Tasmania. As she was approaching the Maatsuyker Islands we flew down to find her. At South Cape, a front was coming through. The sky was inky black with rain and low cloud. We couldn’t find a boat in that weather so we went in to Cox Bight and landed on the beach where we found wilderness guide Bob Geeves with a group camped by the stream at Freney Lagoon. Bob was very surprised to see us with a north-westerly gale blowing.

After a mug of tea and a chat we took oﬀ. When we banked into the wind, our little Cessna achieved an amazing rate of climb as we hit the north-wester. As we turned out to sea, the front had passed and there was one white cap larger than the rest. It was Siska reefed down and revelling in the strong conditions. The mutton birds were out there too!

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M A R G A R E T R I N T O U L I I 1 9 8 0

Margaret Rintoul II was the original Ragamuﬃn built by Fischer in 1969. Here she is sailed by Stan Edwards as she beats into a south-westerly approaching Tasman Island.

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R A G A M U F F I N 1 9 8 0
H I T C H H I K E R 1 9 8 2

Syd Fischer’s Ragamuffin close under the dramatic dolerite sea cliffs as she rounds Tasman Island. The year before, Ragamuffin had won the Admirals Cup which included the infamous Fastnet Race in which 15 sailors and three rescuers were killed.
There was a sense of romance about this boat. She tended to roll from side to side. I recall that Tasmanian yachtsman Charles Blundell, “Chas from Tas” was on board, one of Tasmania’s yachting greats.

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S T Y X 1 9 8 2

Styx has been described as a 40 foot rocket ship. At Tasman Island during strong north-easterlies, there is a now famous gust of wind which howls down from the high cliﬀs. I have seen two boats dismasted as a result. Here during the 1982 Sydney Hobart race Styx, skippered by Joe Abraham, was on the receiving end and I was there to capture this image. Thirty seconds later her mast was parallel with the water. Styx ﬁnished 19th over the line.

S U N S E E K E R 1 9 8 2

Late afternoon light on the east coast of Tasmania. I love the detail in the wake and the following wave. This tells the story of a boat in harmony with the sea. That she appears to be living up to her name makes it even sweeter.

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I N D U L G E N C E 1 9 8 3

A fresh north-easter was blowing down the east coast. The British Southern Cross Cup team boat Indulgence broached and broke two very expensive titanium spinnaker poles. Then she did a Chinese gybe, where the upper section of the mainsail went across the boat and ﬁlled, while the lower section and boom remained on the original side. The incident and the resulting photographs were published around the world and inﬂuenced the decision to measure the righting moment of Sydney Hobart yachts.

V E N G E A N C E 1 9 8 3

One of the early maxis, Vengeance, skippered by David Kellett, rounding Tasman Island. Vengeance had taken line honours in 1981. Here she took my breath away with that beautiful red and yellow against the dolerite columns.

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P I L G R I M 1 9 8 3

Pilgrim with spinnaker and blooper oﬀ Maria Island. The crew are wearing woollen jumpers unlike modern crews with their matching high-tech waterproof outﬁts.

Conditions were so good that day in 1983 that as we flew back to Cambridge, pilot Nick Tanner asked how many rolls of film I had shot. I counted them. I had averaged four frames for each boat. Nick deduced that we had taken one photograph every 46 seconds for five and a half hours. That was a lot of concentration and steep turns.

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I was a sponge for anything that kept me motivated. I always wanted to learn more.

Before I started shooting the yacht race, I had tried to join the Institute of Australian Photography (IAP). For two years they wouldn’t let me in because they saw me as a “backyarder”. And, in some respects I was. Rather than set up my business where all the people lived, I’d ﬁgured it was a good idea to build my studio on the family farm outside Geeveston, in the south of the state. Whenever I got a picture in The Mercury, they would refer to me as, “Geeveston orchardist and photographer” or perhaps, “mountaineer and photographer”, rather than just “Richard Bennett photographer”. And the IAP only wanted professional snappers.

Growing up, I had been destined to be an apple orchardist like Dad and my grandfather. But somewhere in there a thirst for adventure started taking me to the top of mountains. And while climbing out in the remote south-west of Tasmania and in New Zealand in the late 1960s, I’d started taking a camera along.

I saw an advertisement in a magazine for the Famous Photographers School based in Connecticut, USA. It had a correspondence curriculum put together by some of the greats of photography like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Alfred Eisenstaedt. I might not have known who they were, but I knew I wanted to do their course. It cost $637 at a time when I was earning $16 a week labouring for Dad in the orchard.

You’d read a chapter, do the lesson, shoot it, process it and send it to America to have it critiqued by these greats. So, I learnt photography in isolation, between chipping weeds and pruning apple trees.

It’s easy to dream the big dreams when you’re standing at the top of a 20,000-footer in the Andes that had never been climbed before - as I did on numerous occasions in 1969 with the Australian Andean Expedition. I got it into my head that I wanted to take pictures for a living.

In August 1973, I did manage to convince the IAP that I was a real photographer. After that, I never missed a meeting, ever. I really enjoyed meeting the other photographers, being friends with them, sharing ideas. In time, I became Tasmanian president and national president and would go on to hold just about every oﬃce within the organisation.

And while weddings, family portraits and a bit of commercial work for the paper mill were my bread and butter in that period, my two great photographic passions were the wilderness and the yacht race. For most people, birthdays or Christmas or footy ﬁnals punctuate their year. For me, it became the Sydney Hobart. It all revolved around the race.

S H O G U N 1 9 8 4

In 1984, I went out to shoot my 11th race but a strong southerly off the NSW coast, combined with rough seas and then difficult conditions in Bass Strait, meant that most of the fleet didn’t arrive in my patch. Out of 151 starters, only 46 boats made it to Hobart. It had never occurred to me that the Sydney Hobart fleet would not arrive.
There were only 46 boats left in the race when I flew around Tasman Island. I saw the most beautiful backlight in my favourite gunmetal colours streaming through Tasman Passage, the narrow gap between Cape Pillar and Tasman Island where you can see right the way up to Port Arthur, but not a boat to be seen. Then, to the north, I spotted a red, blue and yellow spinnaker. “Too far away,” I thought, deciding to stay put and orbit for 20 minutes or so as the spinnaker approached. “The light won’t hold,” I thought. “I am not that lucky.” And it was expensive! Every hour in the air cost. But, the light did hold and Shogun sailed into the perfect shot. When preparedness and opportunity meet great things sometimes do happen. This Shogun picture won a gold award at the Professional Photographers of America Awards in 1985. It also won a gold award at the Australian National Print Awards and the Ilford Trophy for the highest scoring entry that year.
So, it was slim pickings for pilot Nick Tanner and me as we scoured the seas for survivors off the Tasman Peninsula.

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The Shogun picture made my year. As gratifying as the success of that shot was though, I knew I’d missed the real action - when those 105 yachts were getting pummelled out of the race. Imagine the pictures there would have been out there!

I realised I had to shoot the boats before they got to Tasmania. The yachties were used to seeing lovely pictures of their boats leaving Sydney Harbour in beautiful weather. And then they’d see my pictures of them oﬀ the Tasmanian coast, but nobody had pictures in between - where the real action happened. I’d only done the Flinders Island thing in 1975 when it hadn’t worked so well.

So, I approached my pilot, “Hey Nick, I want to photograph storms out at sea. How do we do that?” “You need an Aero Commander,” he said. “We’ve got one. It’s got a high wing. It’s all weather. It’s got long endurance.”

I took a look at it and could see that the door was directly behind the propeller so I could imagine the blast if I stuck my head out while we were doing 120 knots (222km/h). “I can’t work out of that.”

“We could take the door off,” he said. “You can take the door off it?” Who knew? Nick suggested I lie on the floor to get my head below the propeller. “Nick, I’m not sure about this.” “Let’s give it a go. And we’ll work something out with the charter costs if it doesn’t work.” The Aero Commander gave us about six hours in the air compared to four hours for the Cessna. In reality, our time in the air is often more limited by your bladder capacity than your fuel capacity. So, I’m always careful not to drink much before going up.